Myths about the Cloud

Nancy Medica

Nancy is HR Recruiter at Making Sense and Argentina’s Software Chamber representative of the US ArgenTIna IT network. She considers herself as a communication and social media lover. Keep in touch with her on LinkedIn!

Within various comments and opinions we hear and read wordwide regarding cloud computing, we have already explained the basics. Also, there are several myths that may confuse us and formulate a bad concept of the new system.

Myth #1: The Cloud Isn’t Secure

It is the argument most pronounced, and ironically the most believed, but it’s not true. Although there are some internal networks which are more secure than cloud services, there are also plenty of cloud services that are more secure than internal networks.

Security is not a binary object, i.e. secure or insecure. In fact, security is a matter of degrees. Having good security means understanding and managing risks. Of course, if we compare cloud security to internal security, the internal network will always be more transparent to you than the comparative opacity of a cloud provider.

If you analyze and asses the cloud service, the security if offers might be as good as, or even better than, an internal solution.

If you want to have your system in-house, you must have the budget and the skills available to match those of a cloud provider. Research indicates that cloud providers spend 20 times what a customer does on security, so having such a budget would seem unlikely. Cloud companies rely on their security measures to protect their reputation and their business, thus they are paranoid about a security breach.

The security of your data is a cloud provider’s top priority. According to the Mimecast Cloud Barometer survey conducted this summer, security is the second most utilized cloud service.

Myth #2: The Cloud Isn’t Reliable

The vendors have a strict Service Level Agreement and publish their performance figures publicly. Not so many organizations invest money to give their IT departments the budget to do this in-house.

Myth #3: The Cloud Is All-or-Nothing

It’s said that you are or you are not “in the cloud”, but it doesn’t work that way. How do you decide which services to try in the cloud? Use the determining factor of differentiation: Is that service crucial to differentiating your company from your competition? If not, it’s a commodity and should be a candidate for cloud computing.

Windows Azure’s Future

Nancy Medica

Nancy is HR Recruiter at Making Sense and Argentina’s Software Chamber representative of the US ArgenTIna IT network. She considers herself as a communication and social media lover. Keep in touch with her on LinkedIn!